New Delhi, Oct 2: With the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme marking 50 years of its launch by then prime minister Indira Gandhi, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Thursday said it has since been renamed and subsumed under the Mission Saksham Anganwadi and POSHAN 2.0 but “unfortunately, the governance of the scheme has not kept pace with the name change”.
He said the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Women and Child Development, under the chairmanship of Congress leader Digvijaya Singh, has made several key recommendations for strengthening the ICDS.
Many of these were also outlined by the Congress in its “Nyay Patra” for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and included doubling the wages of anganwadi workers and helpers, Ramesh said.
The party had suggested hiring an additional worker for every anganwadi centre to focus exclusively on early childhood care and education, he pointed out.
It had called for allocating sufficient funds for the ICDS, including the revision of the cost norms for anganwadi services, which was supposed to have occurred in the Financial Year 2020-21 but has still not occurred, despite being promised in the finance minister’s budget speech earlier this year, Ramesh said.
Ramesh said the anganwadi services should be extended to include day-care and creche services for children aged above six months.
He said the Congress had recommended increasing the number of anganwadi centres, in line with the estimated population of the country in 2025, rather than relying on Census 2011 figures.
It had also called for a provision of hot-cooked meals rather than take-home rations for all eligible beneficiaries of anganwadi services, the Congress leader said.
“Today is ICDS@50. 50 years ago today, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi launched the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). Today, there are 13.96 lakh Anganwadi Centres across the country which provide early education, health, and nutrition services to more than 7.65 crore children across the country,” Ramesh said in a post on X.
Over the decades, the ICDS has been critical to the tremendous improvement in India’s human-development indicators, he added.
It is one of the largest — if not the largest — child-welfare programmes in the world, the former Union minister said.
“The ICDS has since been renamed and subsumed under the Mission Saksham Anganwadi and POSHAN 2.0. Unfortunately, the governance of the scheme has not kept pace with the name change,” he said. (PTI)
